QoE-driven Delay-adaptive Control Scheme Switching for Time-delayed Bilateral Teleoperation with Haptic Data Reduction

Teleoperation systems with haptic feedback allow a human user to remotely interact with a dangerous or inac-cessible environment, perform various tasks, and perceive the haptic feedback. To ensure system stability while maintaining the best possible quality of experience (QoE), different teleoperation control schemes and haptic communication strategies need to be selected to adapt to varying network conditions and teleoperation tasks. In this paper, we propose a QoE-driven control scheme switching approach, which adaptively selects the control scheme that provides the best possible QoE for varying communication delay. A transition period is designed to moderate the artifacts during the switching phase. Haptic data reduction approaches are developed for the switching strategy to match the characteristics of each control scheme. Our experiments verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Subjective tests confirm that the proposed adaptive switching scheme is able to achieve a superior user QoE in contrast to a fixed control scheme in the presence of varying communication delay up to 200 ms.